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No, Canada Will not Cover Your Preexisting Condition

With the recent vote for the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to repeal and replace the Obama era Affordable Care Act (ACA), there has been a lot of discussion on who the AHCA will hurt. One of the (many) concerns is that the new legislation should it pass in the senate will roll back rules guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting conditions. These changes if enacted would disproportionately affect disabled people. This has spawned the online protest #IAmAPreexistingCondition to put a human face on the people who at risk of losing their healthcare or who will see its cost skyrocket.

The changes have also spawned a lot of Canadian smugness and this meme has been making the rounds.

Image description: Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a white man with dark hair in his forties gazes into the distance with his fisted hand touching his lip in a pensive expression. Text on the image reads “Hey girl, I’ll cover your preexisting condition”

The thing is the meme is a lie. In terms of how healthcare works in Canada, the language of preexisting conditions is generally meaningless. There are simply services that are or aren’t covered. If you’re in the system, you’re in the system. Canadians generally don’t talk about preexisting conditions the way Americans do because it’s a system we were either born into or gained access to simply by being Canadians.

The thing is though, even though we don’t generally use the language of preexisting conditions to discriminate in our healthcare system, there is still a lot of discrimination. As I mentioned, rather than excluding people based on preexisting conditions, there are simply services that are or aren’t covered. Whether a service is covered depends on whether it is considered essential. Many services largely associated with the care of disability are not considered essential. As such they either not covered and people who need them either have to pay out of pocket or seek private insurance or coverage is given at the whim of individual provinces.

This creates a second class access to the healthcare system for disabled people. We either may not have access to things that we need or our access to them depends entirely on where we live.

One of the primary principles of Canadian healthcare is that it’s supposed to be portable. You’re supposed to be able to get service regardless of your province of origin. This, however, does not apply to services that are not considered essential. So while I as a Saskatchewan resident have been able to get X-rays in BC (for an injury) and an ultrasound in Ontario (oddly enough for the same injury). I do not have access to consistent care related specifically to my disability because Saskatchewan may cover things that other provinces do not or vice versa and I can only access what is available in Saskatchewan.

This creates a couple of issues. There’s the fact that depending on your province of residence you may have less access to covered disability specific care. So the system is inherently unequal. There is also the fact that interprovince bureaucracies make it difficult to determine which services you should have access to while out of your home province or who to bill if you can figure it out. The outcome is that disabled people end up paying out of pocket for things that should be covered.

So for people within the Canadian system, there are still access inequalities. Inequalities that largely target the same groups of people likely to be disadvantaged if the AHCA passes.

Image description: The same meme as before except that text has been added over Trudeau’s face which reads “Except Canada doesn’t let disabled people immigrate #StopAbleism”

Immigration is pretty much the only circumstance where Canada considers preexisting conditions. So the meme is a lie. Canada will not cover your preexisting condition. If you have access to the system you are covered for a set of predefined essential services and the services that are most often considered inessential are those associated with disability.

So, no, Canada doesn’t cover preexisting conditions and flaunting healthcare access does nothing to address the very real dangers being faced by disabled people in the United States right now. This meme just taunts the people most negatively impacted by a potential adoption of the AHCA with lies.

*Note: I do not want to get into an oppression olympics competition here so comments along the lines of “suck it up Canada is still better” will not get through. They are reductive and also don’t address the disingenuous smugness over Canada’s healthcare system.

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